BESTO mAs MONT Sea AdobeCONTENTS PAGE 7 24 34 42 45 58 67 am 8 102 Foreword Introduction A Thumbnail History Discography Tuning The Recording The Wes Montgomery Style MISSILE BLUES YESTERDAYS WEST COAST BLUES CARIBA AUDIO TRACKS a4 5 6 78 I'VE GROWN ACCUSTOMED TO HER FACE 9-10 BESAME MUCHO FRIED PIES MI COSA FOUR ON SIX MISTY SUNDOWN O.@D. Guitar Notation Legend " 12:13 14-18 19 20 21 22FOREWORD This is the first Signature Licks transcription book/CD to explore the guitar style of Wes Montgomery. It is designed as both a stylistic profile and a resource for enlarging your musical palette. It can be approached in several ways. For the neophyte, it will serve {as a wonderful introduction to the art of jazz guitar. The tablature format will invite even the non-reader to experience this rich and fascinating music. Remember: Montgomery himself was not a reader. For the intermediate player, it is a valuable source book and a means for developing the ear, learning the jazz guitar lexicon, and developing greater improvisation skills. Rock, pop, and blues guitarists alike will find countless intriguing licks here to add to their arsenals, Advanced guitarists, particularly those accomplished in other styles, will benefit tremendously from the note-for-note transcriptions, technical analysis of Montgomery's improvisations, and accompanying audio tracks. For those musicians, @ recommended goal would be to physically master and memorize a piece, and to recreate its actual performance at tempo with the accompanying recording. The benefits of spend- ing time like this in “the woodshed” will be enormous and immediately apparent. Accordingly, this volume deviates from my previous works in that there is a greater ‘emphasis on performance with longer play-along tracks as befits the jazz repertory. Sheer physical space would not allow a blow-by-blow description of every musical event—espe- cially in the multi-chorus environment of jazz improvisation. Suffice it to say Wes Montgomery's music tems with signature licks. To cite each one and play it slowly would be impractical, and beyond the scope of this volume. As a happy consequence, each musical selection can be presented in its full glory. Enjoy. —Wolf Marshall INTRODUCTION Wes Montgomery was the guiding force behind the second great epoch of mod- ‘em jazz guitar. if we consider the first as having started with the early experiments of Charlie Christian in the late 1980s and early 1940s, then the next revolution belongs to Wes Montgomery. Like the musical cataclysm caused by Christian's solo fights, Montgomery had a resoundingly powerful impact on his contemporaries. Virtually all established guitarists went sourrying back to the woodshed—to re-evaluate their own approaches, to incorporate his patented octave playing and “impossible” block chording into their music, or to emulate his warm, fleshy tone, blues-based conception, and strong- ly swinging rhythmic feel. Jazz guitar music itself has come to be defined by his presence as either pre-Montgomery or post-Montgomery in concept and level of performance, and practically every jazz guitarist to emerge after his appearance has borne the mark of his influence—Joe Pass, George Benson, Pat Martino, Pat Metheny, Emily Remler, Larry Carlton, and Lee Ritenour, to name a handful Wes Montgomery's influence was all-encompassing—affecting, directly or indi- rectly, the studio scene and film scores, easy listening and pop records, R&B, the incipi- ent genre of rock (heard variously in the music of Santana, Jimi Hendrix, the Grateful Dead, the Doors, and many others), and even country guitar. His contribution is at the core of universal guitar music, crossing over the borders that separate diverse players stylisti- cally. It is alluded to in the work of the heaviest rock guitarists (Steve Vai, Paul Gilbert, et al), and is quoted outright in the repertory of players like Stevie Ray Vaughan and Eric Johnson while being equally at home in TV commercials, all forms of contemporary pop- Ular music, and the syrupy “Muzak” (elevator music) format.